Spanakopita

Well, would you look at that? I made spanakopita - using the infamously difficult filo dough - and it was good.

Spinach, onions, ricotta, feta, eggs, flour - basically you tip this into a bowl and stir it up. TWO POUNDS of spinach. That's THREE ten-oz bags, which is what our grocery had. Only I bought two in the morning because my math is contemptible and so that afternoon, with onions bubbling on the stove, I had to rush out to buy another one.

 Catastrophe was averted. There's definitely enough spinach in this thing.

That's the finished product. It looked much yummier than that when it was golden and bubbling and fresh from the oven and smelling deliciously of butter...

That's another thing. I used nearly TWO POUNDS of butter. Well, one and a half. But still, one and a half pounds of butter - does anyone have any idea of how many calories that is? Whatever else this spanakopita is - and it's certainly quite good - it is NOT for dieters.

Now let's talk about filo dough. I'll assume that no one knows what this is so I can describe it. It's a million sheets of ultra-ultra-ultra thin dough. Paper-thin. Yes, I am serious. The stuff is so thin that you can see through it. And when you slather it in butter, you can't see it at all.

It's my firm belief that stuff like filo dough is a vehicle. You wrap something tasty in it and the whole thing tastes like the tasty thing. What you do not do is put a tiny dollop of something tasty in the middle and wrap it in hundreds of layers of the vehicle, because then it tastes like the vehicle and not like the tasty stuff. This is my problem with things like filo dough. There's always way too much of it. Baklava should taste like honey and walnuts, not like crackly, crunchy sawdust.

Croissants take really delicate dough. Filo dough is about twice as delicate. That's why, when my father made it with Mom, he spent most of the time cursing. The dough just shredded in his hands.

That (and I'm being quite smug about this) did not happen to me. Not even close. The dough was difficult to handle, but it didn't do anything even close to shredding. I picked it up carefully and laid it down in the pan carefully and nothing shredded.

I think Dad's a bit miffed that I managed something that he didn't.

Even if he is miffed, he heartily enjoyed the spanakopita, and so did everyone else. Look!

It's yummy. Like more difficult quiche.

But I have to say, quiche is actually better and not nearly so much work...this spanakopita wasn't as good as my mother's quiche. So if you're craving this, just make some quiche. It's good, it's easy, it doesn't require a whole roll of filo dough.

By the way, I am now in a Journalism class for 10th grade! And it's supposed to be summer, but yesterday it was freezing and rainy and today it's cloudy and chill. I hope it warms up and suns out.

Vanille Kipferl at last!

So, as some of you (but probably not most) may know, when I am independent (of my parents) and either a) extremely wealthy or b) living off student loans, you will find me (or not) traveling. To EVERYWHERE - London, Stonehenge, Marseille, Paris, Mumbai, Venice, Rome, Istanbul, Budapest, Moscow, Johannesburg, Panama City, the Andes - so when I mean everywhere, I really mean it.

I will definitely be going to Vienna.

Eva Ibbotson introduced it to me (The Morning Gift, The Star of Kazan. Both excellent, both well worth reading. SofK is a "children's" novel, but MG is for teens/adults.) While Paris was on the brink of becoming the amazingly cultured city it is now, Vienna had already been one for hundreds of years. The Lipizzaners - Sachers Hotel - the Prater - the music - the opera - the coffee - the artists. Gustav Mahler was the musical director of the Vienna Court Opera. Freud lived here. Coffee was practically invented here. (No; maybe that was the Turks.)

Anyway, Vienna is an incredibly wonderful city, a lot like Paris, but even more beautiful. I mean, look at this:

And this: 

How can you resist a city like that?

Moving on.

Among Vienna's many other attributes, it's also famous for a little cookie-biscuit-thing called kipferl, which I have wanted to try for a very long time, and finally, what do you know? I made a batch!

DISCLAIMER: This would never have happened without the generosity and loveliness of a very dear friend, Irene Goldman-Price, who sent along a bag of almond flour and some vanilla beans. (If she's reading this, I love her enormously, not only because she aids and abets the baking of kipferl but because she's incredible and wonderful. And marvelous.)

With almond flour and two shrivelled-up vanilla beans in hand (they look a bit like slightly damp twigs that have been soaking in vanilla; they also smell so strongly of vanilla that our entire kitchen smelled pleasantly of it. It's quite lovely), I dumped butter, bourbon (close enough to vanilla essence), salt, and something else that I can't remember into a mixer and beat it up, then added two cups of almond flour and some more regular white flour. And stirred.

And what I got was a crumbly, crumby mess. Not a dough. Not even close. Dismayed, dejected, and despondent, I added another half-stick of butter and stirred and beat and crossed my fingers until finally, it started to look like the "cohesive" dough described in the recipe. An hour in the refrigerator and the stuff was ready to roll.

(I just realized that "ready to roll" is actually an expression. Oops.)

What I meant was, "ready to roll into 2-inch longs about the thickness of my thumb." This I proceeded to do. It took an hour - I had to mash the dough in my hands for about a minute before it would roll into cylinders instead of crumbling. This wasn't much fun.

1. The dough was pretty buttery and so my hands felt sort of greasy and gross.

2. NPR's "Cartalk" was on, which I normally like but which was now grating on my nerves.

3. Since my hands were all greasy, I couldn't turn off the radio or put in a CD.

4. Why didn't I just wash my hands? Even now, the answer to this evades me. The only reason I can come up with is that I thought if I stopped rolling out the cylinders, I would never want to start again. This is probably true.

So anyway, I rolled out twenty cylinders and curved them into things that looked more like horseshoes than the "moon-shaped crescents" the recipe advised, and put them in the oven and baked them.

And when they came out, I ground up a vanilla bean and some powdered sugar and rolled some of them in it.

Turns out, I should have used half the vanilla bean.

 It's not that they're not good, because they are; the vanilla sugar is just really, really strong. I did the rest of the kipferl in powdered sugar. And here they are.

 

Well, here's one of them anyway.

Kind of ugly, really, but they taste good. Shortbready and almondy and crunchy - fragile, but yummy. Irene, the benefactor of the entire experiment, should be receiving a box of them shortly. I would send them to everyone, but we only have so many, and besides, they'd arrive broken, even though on the box for Irene and her husband Alan says "FRAGILE" on it four times, "THIS WAY UP" three times, and "THIS IS THE BOTTOM OF THE BOX. TURN IT OVER SO CONTENTS ARRIVE WHOLE!" once on the bottom.

Well, they turned out good. Worth making again, definitely.

And now for something completely different...

This is the latest installment of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which is a video blog (vlog) based on Pride and Prejudice. Don't you think that Bing Lee (yes, that's really what they named him) is the sweetest, nicest person...well...EVER?

Haircuts and mousses and aprons and more

To my devoted bloggers, who I know are just waiting for the next post.

Marcie and Mike, if you do not already know this, are two of the most wonderful people on the planet. They're amazing. If you haven't met them, you would like them.

They've come to stay with us (yay!) because one of their sons, Toby, is getting married at the Moose on Saturday. He's been a bowling volunteer and has basically saved the Moose's bowling alley - we can't thank him enough.

Anyway, look what Marcie brought me!

And the best part, the pocket:

Isn't that just awesome??

I made Marcie and Mike a chocolate mousse. Voila!

It was good. It was quite good. Unfortunately, we ran out of semisweet chocolate chips and Jem had to run to the store and they had run out of them too so he bought Hershey's milk chocolate chips, so I had to skimp on the sugar in the whipped cream...and oh, I found out what happens when you overbeat whipped cream just a little bit.

Anyway, the mousse was quite lovely. Next time, though, I'm sticking with normal chocolate chips. (Take note, this isn't for this blog, it's just a way of sharing my life with you. Assuming you would care. Gosh, blogs are really self-centered, aren't they?)

Oh, and this is exciting:

I got a haircut. You can't really tell in that picture, but it's a few inches shorter and quite chic. Or so Mom tells me, but she told me that my hairband was very Audrey Hepburn a few days ago and even though AH is the highest eschelon of style, I don't really think I'm anything like her at all. And I'm not fishing. It's just true.

Right. So. New dishes coming up shortly. Keep reading!

Dark Chocolate Tart goes WAY downhill

If you're in the mood for a delightful, glossy, fun, sweet cooking blog, then you're definitely in the wrong place.

Sorry.

But really, last night was probably one of the weirdest, most confusing...times...in my entire cooking life. Here's what I learned: If the recipe says bitter/semisweet chocolate, use that. DON'T use unsweetened. Those are words of wisdom.

So, here's what happened. I made this tart - it's not a cake or a pie, but it doesn't have fruit, which is what I associate "tart" with. So I guess it's...just a chocolate tart?

Anyway. Focusing. Crust didn't present that much trouble. Moved on to the filling. Melt chocolate and butter, add eggs, sugar, and vanilla (ahem: in this house, it's bourbon only; we don't even have normal vanilla) and pour it into the crust and you're done. It's that easy. What can go wrong?

Wow.

Well, I used half unsweetened chocolate and half semisweet. This takes down the sugar content a whole lot, since there is absolutely zero sugar in unsweetened chocolate. Sugar acts as a baking agent, so when I stuck the tart thing in the oven and set the timer for twelve minutes, like it said on the recipe card (The Chocolate Deck, #33, Dark Chocolate Tart), after twenty-five minutes it was still far from done. Thirty-five. Nope. Forty? Oh just give up Maia, take it out.

So I did. It cooled, I took it out of the pan, we cut it and ate it. And what do you know? It's pretty good. I did overcook it just a little bit. The top is a bit crispy and the crust quite crumbly, but overall it's really not bad.

 

The pan of course started leaking halfway through, so I stuck our old battered, revolting baking sheet under it. That's why that picture kind of looks...horrible.

My family liked it, though.

 Admittedly, it was a bit overdone...but it's really chocolatey. Very intense. Very intense.

The Verdict: Decent. Next time I'll only use semisweet, and maybe it'll cook in twelve minutes instead of forty.

If I can get my nerve up, I'll be making spanakopita soon - I'm a bit nervous because Dad says it's quite difficult. "When your mother and I made it, I spent most of the time swearing." I believe it. It's the filo dough - it just tears. It's delicious, though, apparently, so worth it.

Ciao!

Poulet Saute aux Herbes de Provence

Doesn't everything just sound better in French? In English, that title is "Sauteed Chicken with Provence Herbes." But in French, it's "Poulet Saute"...it just sounds better!

Anyway. It would taste better in France, too, I'm betting, because I kind of completely screwed up. The recipe (Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child, Vol. I) says that you should end up with a kind of sauce like hollandaise, but that's definitely not what I had. It tasted fine...but Mom said it would benefit from a sauce, and since she very rarely offers something so near to a criticism, I'm thinking it would most definitely absolutely benefit from a sauce.

Here's what we ended up with.

Trust me, it tasted a lot better than it looked.

But as you can see, it's hardly a sauce. More like...salad dressing. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but IT WOULD BENEFIT FROM A SAUCE.

Okay. I'm definitely obsessing about this.

It looked far yummier on a plate, with some lovely...um...sugarsnap peas. I think. And it really did taste okay.

Let me acquaint you with the difficulties I met during cooking. First, Julia Child calls for white whine. We do not happen to have any white wine in the house. So I used sherry. Not cooking sherry, sherry sherry, the kind you drink. (I cannot fathom why; it is absolutely repulsive.) You pour this sherry into a saucepan and let half of it boil off.

What it doesn't say in the recipe is that you have to remove the juices from sauteeing the chicken. So I didn't. I dumped the sherry into the pan and let it boil away, breathing in these disgusting sickly sherry fumes the whole time - I swear I started to feel light-headed. And it was a pretty hot day, in the upper 80s, and even in a cool house when you're slaving over a sherry-scented fumes (have I mentioned how absolutely revolting sherry is?) it starts to feel the tiniest bit uncomfortable. Read: hellish.

Okay, so the sherry boiled off (along with half the sauteeing juices) and I added whatever it said to and dumped in the chicken and kind of swilled it around to coat it in the dressing. It definitely wasn't sauce.

See, what you're actually supposed to do is take the saute juices out, and then you boil the sherry (gagging the whole time) and then you remove the pan from heat and wait till it's way cooler. And then you add lemon juice and egg yolks. And then you add the saute juices by tablespoons, until it is sauce. Like hollandaise.

Remember that if you're going to make this. Because it was okay without a sauce, but it would benefit from one.

The Verdict: Decent enough. Would benefit from a sauce.

Today, or maybe tomorrow (depends if I can tear myself away from my novel), I'll be making a Dark Chocolate Tart. And sometime this summer, if I can get my nerve up, I'm going to make Le Glorieux, a devishly difficult chocolate cake from Vol. II of Julia Child. Wish me luck. Though that won't be anytime soon. End of July, earliest.

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Hey, guess what? I figured out how to subscribe to this blog! (If anyone is interested. Which I hope you are. I hope all those pageviews on the Settings screen aren't mine.)

Anyway. If you scroll aaaaalllll the way down to the bottom of the page, there is a link that says Subscribe: Post (Atoms) or something like that. Click on it. You'll get a new tab with a yellow box at the top of the page. It'll say: Subscribe to this feed using...

If you click on the arrow on the right of that "subscribe to this feed" box, it will give you a list of applications - Google, Yahoo, etc. Find your email program and click it and then click Subscribe now.

If you, you know, want to subscribe. If you're interested.

*My casual tone could easily be mistaken for open desperation (SUBSCRIBE!!! SUBSCRIBE!!! PLEASE!) but I assure you, dear readers, that is not the case. I'm merely asking for your interest and support in my...ah, cooking endeavors.* Do I sound pompous? I sound pompous. Sorry.

Lemon Cake!

Well, contrary to expectations (after the batter was sickly sweet I had my doubts) the lemon layer cake turned out surprisingly good! I did overbeat it, so it's a bit tough - be careful with that if you decide to make it yourself. Also, I spent at least twenty minutes grating and squeezing lemons, and if you have any paper cuts or scrapes or anything, the lemon juice somehow gets into them and then seeps through your bloodstream, so by the end my whole hand was throbbing. Although that might have been because I have weak fingers and I'd spent a lot of time squishing lemons into a bowl.

Okay, moving on to the cake itself. It is good. I, however, like creamy icings more than liquidy ones (not to say vaguely mucussy) and also, if I'd put in three cups of powdered sugar, instead of two cups of that and one of flour, it would have been WAY too sweet. I had to add extra lemon juice to both cake and icing. If I hadn't, I think it would have been really, really sweet.

Right. Moving on....

Cake in the oven.

The icing. Or frosting. Yes, it was that liquidy...it kind of soaked through the whole cake, too. But it's very lemony.

The finished cake! I put raspberries on it in a spiral, but it really looked horrible so I just scattered them all over it. Without them the cake would have been a) hideous and b) not nearly as good. I think next time I'll put more raspberries on top and some in the middle - prettier, tastier and far more expensive.

 

After a few hours it looked less mucussy, because the icing soaked in - it was really good, very lemony. Nothing on the Killer Lemon Souffle, but relatively yummy.

Behind the cake, there was a disaster zone. Icing dripped all over the counter; two plates, one ceramic and one paper, and there's one out of sight; crumbs everywhere; wax paper covered in cooking spray; buttery pans...oh, it was a complete mess.

The Verdict: It's good. Better with more raspberries, and be careful of overbeating. Overall - very yummy.

The Song: My most recent favorite song. This is becoming a trend. Good luck surviving the heat - here in Central PA at noon, it's over 90.